Labor Day Weekend

Well, we are officially back to regular programming. So many, many thanks are owed to my beautiful girlfriend for getting us started again. One thing that is unusual about this blog is that it is only at its best, and creative regular, it seems, when Nadia and I are far away from each other. During the summer while Nadia was in St. Louis, we blogged...well, never. Many things were started and half-finished, but nothing was ever posted. That's on track to change now that Nadia and I are both back in school. Expect the unexpected from us. Expect, well...ramblings on anything and everything.

But in the meantime, I am taking most of Labor Day Weekend off, rather than the "off days" I usually take which still involve self-absorbed research, writing, and schoolwork. I am swearing off serious work until Tuesday in honor of the holiday weekend.



Although the history is largely ignored by most people today, Labor Day began as a Federal holiday in 1894. It was, at the time, considered an empty Congressional gesture to mollify workers in the wake of tremendous social, economic, and political unrest during and after the Pullman Strike by railroad workers in Chicago that spring. The thought of the U.S. Military being mobilized to disperse striking workers, killing 13 citizens in the process, may seem completely foreign to us today. But in reality this type of thing is all too common even in today's world, and the recent riots in London should be a wake-up call to "first-world" nations who believe that socio-economic influenced violence cannot sprout at their doorstep.



I'm continually amazed how much we take for granted, and how much of the history of labor relations in this country has simply disappeared from public consciousness over the last century. The battle of labor versus management, the tension between the individual rights and the collective, are conflicts that continue to define us and shape the direction of our country to this day.



"Labor Day" is like drinking a tall-glass of Congressional Kool-Aid. It rolls off the tongue easily, evoking images of picnics and hot dogs and the end of summer at the lake or beach. We begin the summer with Memorial Day, a somber holiday, and we end the summer with Labor Day, a last triumphalist hurrah before we face the hard facts of Fall. Perhaps the feelings that each evoke should be reversed at times so we remember why these holidays exist in the first place. Take a moment this weekend to think about what the history means and how people fought for their rights, and to make the world a better place for their children and their children's children.